THE PERFECT COUPLE*

How many shows can we watch where Nicole Kidman plays a beautiful, uptight, brittle, rich woman trapped in a miserable marriage but struggling to hold on to her perfectly manicured life? Enough already.

In this latest iteration she plays a successful murder-mystery writer living in a gorgeous summer house in Nantucket with her handsome husband (Liev Schreiber), hosting the wedding of her second son.  The night before the wedding, the bridesmaid is found drowned and the wedding is cancelled.

Whodunnit? We discover in short order that the bridesmaid was pregnant by the paterfamilias, that the first son is a feckless trader in financial trouble, and the bride is actually in love with the groomsman.  And that's just the first couple of episodes. The set-up is that of a classic Agatha Christie mystery where lots of family members have motives that we have to untangle.  Meanwhile, Nicole Kidman is both a master of PR and selling books, but also trying to move away from her image as part of the "perfect couple".  Her best-selling novels feature a crime detecting couple similar to Christie's Tommy and Tuppence - an alliterative crime-busting perfect husband and wife, and the author's marriage is part of the marketing drive.

The six-part TV show is handsomely cast and handsomely filmed in a lavish Cape Cod mansion. Everyone looks the part.  And yet something about the script and performances feels flat. The show just never takes flight. I never cared. Also, if you know your Christie, the solution is pretty easy to figure out. (More on that in the spoiler section after the release information.)

I think the problem is that while director Susanne Bier is great at creating context and a luxury lifestyle on screen, a murder mystery has to be more than Nora Ephron lifestyle porn. It has to hook us in.  And the modern audience demands more of its murder mysteries, especially those set amongst the super-rich. In a post WHITE LOTUS world, THE PERFECT COUPLE just feels plain vanilla - too straight - too dull - too obvious.  Only the wonderful Dakota Fanning seems to be in a different show and to really be having fun with it.  

THE PERFECT COUPLE debuted on Netflix this week. 

SPOILERS - I have not read the source novel by Elin Hilderbrand but understand that the solution is far more ambiguous in the novel. It tells you everything you need to know about how plain vanilla the adaptation is that they decided to give you a proper murderer and motive and then to tie everything up by having a resolution between the author and the bride too.  The lone attempt to spice things up with the author's sketchy backstory feels very shoehorned in. It didn't cohere.

RIPLEY (TV)**

 

I absolutely adore Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels. They are slippery and subversive and dark and dangerous and about the best crime procedurals you can read. I have also loved many of the iterations by which Ripley has found himself on the big screen, from PLEIN SOLEIL to RIPLEY'S GAME and Anthony Minghella's superlative TALENTED MR RIPLEY.

When I first heard that Andrew Scott (ALL OF US STRANGERS) was cast as Ripley I was excited but I assumed that this would be an adaptation of one of the later books when Ripley was older. I was shocked to discover that this was actually an adaptation of the source novel where the characters are meant to be in their twenties. Johnny Flynn's Dickie is also in his forties.  The problem is that this makes the concept of the book seem ... well ... odd. Dickie Greenleaf dodging his responsibilities on a kind of extended gap year in Italy feels right for pretty young things but doesn't quite work for middle-aged men.  And thanks to Zaillian's choice to go for black and white photography, life in Italy never feels beautiful and lush and seductive. Rather, we start off in a world that is decaying and deserted and rather drab.  It's hard to see what in Dickie and Marge's existence would be attractive to Tom. Their life doesn't feel particularly luxurious. And there's no sexual tension between Dickie and Tom, and certainly no apparent love for Dickie on Marge's part. It's just all so flat.

As we move into the second act, things pick up pace. The crime procedural has its own momentum. Whether it needs five episodes though, is doubtful.  We see the quality of Eliot Sumner as Freddie Miles in their pivotal scene with Tom.  A scene that is played very differently to how Philip Seymour Hoffman played it, but with no less menace.  The problem is that Eliot is a good fifteen years younger than Andrew Scott and seems to be in a totally different film.

So far so problematic, but where this adaptation totally loses it is in the final episode. We begin episode eight with a flashback to Caravaggio which is way too on the noise, and a clear case of a showrunner being given way too much running time to pad out. We also get a confrontation between the police inspector and Tom that's so literally incredible it destroyed any respect I had for this adaptation. Minghella's choice to have them never meet was the more elegant solution.

RIPLEY was released on Netflix today.

THE EQUALISER 3****

Something interesting is happening with THE EQUALISER 3.  I was expecting another "does what it says on the tin" vigilante film, along the lines of 1 and 2.  But 3 has a confidence and a vibe that altogether surpasses its predecessors.  It is so patient in doing the work to create its emotional climax that I wonder if it's even commercial.

The plot is simple enough and sounds like a standard Equaliser film.  In the course of equalising a wrong in a Sicilian mafia cell, our protagonist Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) stumbles upon an operation to import ISIS-manufactured hard drugs, the sale of which is funding terrorist attacks in Europe. He calls the scheme in to CIA operative Emma Collins (Dakota Fanning) who brings in the Americans to investigate. Meanwhile, McCall recuperates in a beautiful small town terrorised by organised crime, and decides to equalise their wrongs.

What makes this film fascinating is the way in which the franchise's director, Antoine Fuqua, chooses to go about his business in this final instalment.  

First of all, the style of violence is brutal but credible, and acknowledges McCall/Washington's age. The action sequences are skilful and suspenseful but does not require the superhuman anti-ageing of Tom Cruise in a MI film, or the CGI de-ageing of Harrison Ford in an Indiana Jones film.  McCall's equalising is brutal and effective but always feels perfectly plausible for an older man.

Second, the pace is deliberately slow and the language probably over half in Italian, in a way that truly pays off in the final act.  Fuqua really takes his time establishing McCall's rejuvenation in Altamonte's small town.  The friendship with Dr Enzo, and the slow growth of trust between Robert and the townsfolk, are lightly essayed but deeply moving. The language never switches entirely to English.  I would estimate that over half of the dialogue is in Italian, and I wonder if that choice will impact the film's commercial success. But I loved that choice, as it once again roots McCall in the life of Altamonte and roots us in the stakes of wresting it free of the Camorra. 

The result is a film that has - as strange as it might sound - an elegance, a lightness of touch, but a real impact.  This is enhanced by some truly beautiful cinematography and framing from Fuqua and cinematographer Robert Richardson, as well as the sparing inclusion of only two powerfully choreographed and compelling action sequences. 

It's kind of strange that people don't seem to really talk about Fuqua or this franchise much.  And yet with this instalment - that is so superior to its predecessors - I feel we need to reassess both. Why have they slipped under the radar? Is it because, like the film's protagonist, they are so quiet, unassuming and efficient that they don't call attention to itself? Let me know if you know.

THE EQUALISER 3 is rated R, has a running time of 109 minutes, and is on global release.

ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD

Quentin Tarantino's ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD is a triumph.  Indeed it may be my favourite of his films since the superlative JACKIE BROWN.  It's a love letter to old Hollywood, and drips with compassion for fading stars, and indulges in nostalgia for the days when radio stations were the soundtrack of our lives.  The movie stars Leonardo Di Caprio as Rick Dalton  - a fictional TV star of the 50s and 60s whose career is in the doldrums because of his age and alcoholism.  As a portrait of the fickle callousness of the star system, it's a moving film. There isn't much that's honourable or likeable in Rick, but he's our idiot, and to see him bested in his art and conversation by a child star (Trudi - a scene-stealing Julia Butters) is to weep for him. To see him lured by the quick cash of Spaghetti Westerns and saddled with a young wife is to laugh at our own frailty. He's an idiot, but we care that he's okay.  And we care largely because of the most humanising thing about him - his long and loyal friendship to his stuntman/driver/buddy Cliff Booth. In a career-best performance from Brad Pitt, Cliff is just a decent no bullshit kind of a guy. He's tough.  We see him beat up Bruce Lee in one of the most hilarious scenes in the film, and we hear rumours about a potentially murderous past, so the final showdown is well within the realms of his capabilities, despite his being high as a kite. There's something so tragic about his life in a mobile van, heating up tinned food, and something so likeable about his seeming indifference to it.  He's just a good guy. We see this too in his care for Bruce Dern's Spahn - exploited owner of the ranch in which the Manson Family are living. Which of course brings us to the other story in this film...

I think a lot of us came to this film thinking it was going to be a film about the Manson Murders and it's kind of discombobulating realising that it isn't really. We only meet Manson in one scene, and barely see Polanski from a distance at a party.  Polanski and Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) live next door to Rick, but their lives are largely separate.   And what of Tate?  She's barely given the same screen time or depth of character as the two male leads. She's just a sunny happy dancing blonde, exciting to see herself on screen, in a scene that will give anyone who knows about Tarantino's foot fetish the creeps.  I felt sad for Robbie, who has nothing to do in this film, but really sad for Sharon Tate, who apparently isn't worthy of an inner life.  We do see the events of that fateful night play out. The way in plays out won't surprise people who've seen Tarantino's recent films.  It's really fucking entertaining.  But...

ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD is rated R and has a running time of 119 minutes.  The film played Cannes 2019 and went on global release last summer. It is now available to stream, rent and own.

BRIMSTONE - BFI LFF 2016 - Day 10

BRIMSTONE is a beautifully photographed and designed western thriller that features Dakota Fanning and Guy Pearce in fiercely committed performances.  However, it falls into the trap of seeking to portray and condemn sexual violence against women by basically showing us a lot of sexual violence against women, in such a manner and style that it almost seems to be enjoying it.  The result is a film that looks beautiful and is certainly fiercely focussed on what it wants to achieve, but which jumps the shark at several key moments, and left me wondering whether it was good with occasional misjudgments, or just plain objectionable.

The film is set in the American midwest in the mid 1800s and focusses on a young mute woman (Dakota Fanning) who is a wife and mother to two small children.  In the first of four chapters we see her incite the vengeance of a mean-spiritied judgmental preacher (Guy Pearce) out of all proportion to her apparent crime of having chosen to save a mother over her baby in a troubled delivery.  But still, in this chapter I was convinced this film was going to be a well-acted, tense, taut thriller. That is until a final act of violence so absurd it pulled me out of the film.  But that was ok, because we then moved into the second chapter, and an apparent re-set of the film, as we met a young runaway girl being picked up by Chinese travellers and sold to a brothel keeper.  This was by far the most interesting and successful segment of the film but once again utterly jumped the shark with violence by the end.  And it was notable that at both of these points in the film, a number of people walked out.  Bu the film got really problematic in its third and fourth segment, where the true nature of the relationship between the preacher and the girl is revealed in all its melodramatic, exploitative detail.

What can I say? If this movie had just exercised a little restraint and thought deeply about how to depict violence against women it might have been a really fascinating, genre-bending movie.  But the director, Martin Koolhoven, seems to have zero instinct about what's provocative and what's just offensive.  It's an enormous shame because Guy Pearce and Dakota Fanning are clearly going for something high quality here, but there's let down by a director with a tin ear. 

BRIMSTONE is rated R and has a running time of 148 minutes.  BRIMSTONE played Venice, London and Toronto 2016. It does not yet have a commercial release date.

NIGHT MOVES - LFF 2013 - Day Eight

As some of you may remember, this blog used to be called Movie Reviews for Greedy Capitalist Bastards, because I am one, and I have no truck with pretentious nonsense, vegetarians, and hippies.  So Kelly Reichardt's new flick NIGHT MOVES, fell right into my lap!  It shows you how do-gooding radical lefties can be as self-serving and arbitrarily violent as they would have usgreedy  capitalists be.  It's just that we own it!

So, in this movie three radical tree huggers decide to blow up a damn because this is going to supposedly disrupt the water supply and teach us ipad users a lesson or two.  The first hour of the flick basically plays as an anarchist revolutionary's handbook and I could definitely have done with a faster pace and more thrilling tense feel. It's always the way.  Indie directors think they can do genre, but genre movies are hard, and shouldn't be condescend to.  Making a taught thriller is not easy. 

Reichardt is on safer ground in the second half of the film where he can do his trademark interior exploration of psychology and mood.  Once the deed is done we see problems open up.  The preppie girl, Dena (Dakota Fanning) starts to feel guilty and blab.  Peter Sardgaard's Harmon becomes all too predictably, the manipulative sinister voice on the end of a phone.  That leaves us with the real  emotional and psychological heart of the film: Jesse Eisenberg's Josh.  His performance is so nuanced and moving in the final twenty minutes of the film that it elevates a rather second rate thriller into something altogether finer.   

NIGHT MOVES has a running time of 112 minutes.  NIGHT MOVES played Venice Toronto and London 2013. It will be released in France on March 5th 2014.

THE TWILIGHT SAGA: BREAKING DAWN - PART 2

Bella's journey from whiny reactive teen to Ripleyesque super-mum.

And so the fantastically successful commercial juggernaut that is Twiglet drifts to a close, with this polished, camp but ultimately rather silly final film.  The movie picks up in media res, with our previously whiny, reactive, pathetic heroine Bella (Kristen Stewart) opening her colour-enhanced, fake-eyelashed eyes as a sparkly vampire, all her spider-senses tingling.  The first forty-minutes of the flick see her hop skip and jump through a new world of heightened colour and smell, astonishingly controlling her urge to feed off humans, and coming to terms with the fact that her child, Renesmee, survived because her old flirt-friend and werewolf (Taylor Lautner) "imprinted" on her.  And where's Bella's husband in all this?  Looking on smugly as his "new-born" wife kicks ass and looks hotter than ever.

In the movie's second act, Bella's in-laws, The Cullens, gather up a brood of global vampires to testify to the fact that Renesmee isn't an  out-of-control, dangerous child vampire, but actually a half-human cute little moppet.  Their aim is to reason with the Vampire world's equivalent to the Papacy, led by Michael Sheen's hilariously camp Aro, that Renesmee shouldn't be killed, and failing that, to do battle.  This leads us to the final act of the film, which seeks to give fans of the almost absurdly bloodless novels a humdinger of an action sequence, while also remaining faithful to the more talky, banal denouement of the book. Suffice to say that, as one would expect in this world of emasculated, proto Christian revival vampires, all ends happily for the good guys, and even for the bad guys, because basically the entire plot motivation of this movie has been a gross misunderstanding. 

There's a lot to like in this instalment of the series. Production values are top notch.  Guillermo Navarro's photography of Bella's newly heightened world is beautiful; the bleach blonde dye jobs on the Cullens are less cheap; the CGI wolves are superb; and the Volturi superbly over-the-top.  The acting is just fine, with the exception of Stewart who really does sell it well. Michael Sheen is, of course, stunning, and Dakota Fanning seems to share in his sense of mischief.  I can honestly say I had a fun time watching this movie.

Of course, it doesn't really hang together.  Aro's speech to pre-emptively kill the unknown quantity that is Renesmee kept cracking me up as a caricature of Tony Blair's pro Iraqi war campaign.  The knowing homo-eroticism of Lautner stripping off for Charlie (Billy Burke) broke any seriousness this movie might have had.  And, as with the X-MEN movies, I'm always struck by the disparity and ill-use of the super-powers handed out to the different characters.  Bella has self- control and a defensive shield. Awesome. But this other guy can CONTROL THE ELEMENTS!!! I mean, isn't that game over for the Volturi right there? And as for Alice's power to see the future, so crucial in allowing the screenwriters to have their cake and eat it, if she can see various potential outcomes, doesn't that rather confuse which  of her prophesies to believe in?

Ah well, I guess this isn't a movie we should think about too deeply.  In today's recessionary climate it seems like a nostalgic throw-back to the boom years in which it was written - when beautiful people drove beautiful cars, and a virginal young girl who waited till  marriage would be gifted a beautiful cottage stocked with pretty handbags and shoes. I mean, who needs an education anyway? And let's not even get into the sheer creepiness of poor Renesmee being promised, in utero, to a guy who's already gone through puberty.  To all those pop-culture commentators praising Bella as a modern heroine I say, no no and again no.

But like I said, better not to overthink it.   Better to enjoy the camp hilarity of Sheen's maniacal laugh and Gap ad models ripping each other's heads off. 

BREAKING DAWN PART 2 is on release pretty much everywhere except Armenia, Cambodia, Germany, Singapore and India where it opens next week; Hong Kong where it opens on December 20th and Japan where it opens on December 28th. 

THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON - chiz moan groan

I have two problems with the TWILIGHT saga. In my review of the first flick, I summed up the first: "Instead of lashings of sex and death and sexy death and death-inducing sex, we get a lot of holding hands and big declarations of love but precious little rumpy-pumpy. Frankly, instead of all the narcissistic angst I would've far preferred the heroes to go and have some healthy sex and get over themselves. But that, my friends, kills the goose that laid the golden royalty cheques."

My second fundamental problem with the TWILIGHT saga is that it's completely dishonest. It's meant to be about pure love and abstinence but at the same time it makes no bones about showing buff guys stripped to the waist. Far from being about spiritual, emotional love, it's as much about the objectifying lust-objects as Baywatch. The only PC touch is that it's the men rather than the women who get their kit off.

These twin problems result in books and films that are as constrained as their characters: teens who want to jump each others bones but can't. And that leads to frustration on the part of the characters and the viewers.

NEW MOON opens with teen vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) abandoning his human girlfriend Bella Swann (Kristen Stewart) because he fears he can't keep her safe. So follows about ninety minutes of Bella going being depressed and boring. The only time she breaks off from this emo behaviour is to say something assinine to the newly buff teen were-wolf Jacob Black (newly buff Taylor Lautner). "You've gotten...um...really buff" etc. Unfortuntely (ironically?) given the lack of on-screen chemistry between Bella-Edward or Bella-Jacob the whole love triangle thing never gets off the ground. In the final half hour we get something that looks like narrative momentum. Edward's sister has had a vision of Bella committing suicide, which has prompted Edward to do the same, Romeo & Juliet stylee. Aforementioned sister and Bella thus rush to Italy (for no other reason than that it looks picturesque) to prevent Edward from inciting some powerful vampires from killing him. All this might have been quite dramatic were it not for the fact that Michael Sheen is evidently taking the piss and hamming up his performance as the super-powerful Vampire king or whatever he is meant to be.

All in all, a movie that is dull, assinine, dull, picturesque, camp, dull.

And there are how many more of these to go?

THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON is on global release.

CORALINE - psych horror for kids

When you boil it all down, CORALINE is an animated kids film that plays like a psychological horror flick. And, I'm not being trite. CORALINE is everyone's worst nightmare. She's a young teenage girl who lives in a crumbling old house, with creepy neighbours, and workaholic parents who just want to get rid of her. No wonder her sub-conscious creates an alternate universe in which she is very much the centre of attention. The other mother is always cooking a tasty meal and the other father is always ready to play Coraline-centric games. Of course, this sort of Stepford existence is as dysfunctional as the real world, and the price of staying is to become an automaton - symbolised by having buttons stitched on your eyes. And thus, Coraline battles to return to her own world, but there are no happy endings. Mum's bought her some new gloves but she's as crotchety as ever, and Dad is as pussy-whipped. Coraline is still self-absorbed, it's just that now she knows there are consequences.

The resulting film is beautifully drawn, truly psychologically scary (that's a good thing), and faithful in most part to the Neil Gaiman original story. OK, so director Henry Selick added Wybie, the dumb-ass side-kick to lessen Coraline's isolation, but then again, he stripped down the up-beat musical numbers to a single song from They Might Be Giants. Following on from THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS and JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH, Selick has cemented his reputation as the pre-eminent director of intelligent children's movies - movies that understand that childhood isn't schmaltzy and sun-lit as symbolised by cute talking animals, but dark and insecure and selfish and savage. The only real criticism I could make of CORALINE is that, technically, it's a tour-de-force of stop-motion animation but it barely uses, and doesn't need, the added layer of 3-D. Presumably this was just a shameless cash-in on the part of the studio.

CORALINE was released earlier this year in the US, Canada, Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Portugal, Panama, Argentina, Hungary, Poland, Kazakhstan, Russia, Romania, Lithuania, Norway and the UK. It opens next weekend in the Netherlands, Estonia, Sweden and Turkey. It opens later in May in Bulgaria, Iceland and Greece. It opens on June 5th in Finland and Spain; on June 10th in Belgium, France, the Czech Republic and Denmark; in Israel on June 25th; in Italy on July 3rd; in Germany on July 20th; in Australia on August 6th and in Singapore on September 3rd.

PUSH - Soporific sci-fi chase flick

PUSH is an incoherent, derivative sci-fi flick from the team behind stylish noir comedy, LUCKY NUMBER SLEVIN. SLEVIN was guilty of using its convoluted plot as a mere clothes rail for quirky characters and lavish set pieces. PUSH is guiltier still. Basically it's just a chase movie set in Hong Kong. Chris Evans, Dakota Fanning and Camilla Belle are psychically gifted ex-pats on the lam from the a clandestine government agency that wants to exploit them for military purposes. It plays like a mixture of HEROES and JUMPER, and starts of as a tolerably well-made, if over-familiar, sci-fi flick. About half way through the script breakds down completely, with yawn-inducing results.

PUSH is on release in the US, France, Romania, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Spain and the UK. It opens next week in Greece. It opens in March in Belgium, Singapore, Argentina and Turkey. It opens in April in Estonia, Italy, New Zealand and Poland. It opens on May 1st in Brazil and on August 13th in Germany.

London Film Festival Day 9 - THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES

THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES is a movie set in South Carolina in 1964 and features a cast full of famous African-American actresses. Queen Latifah, Alicia Keys and Sophie Okenodo play August, June and May Boatwright - three sisters that live in a beautiful house and make honey. They are affluent, cultured, strong and independent. This is so rare for the period, where Jennifer Hudson's abused house-made Rosaleeen is the norm, that the Boatwright family seem like something out of a fairy tale. Certainly this is how runaway Lily Owens (Dakota Fanning) sees them.

I had thought that a movie about a little white girl taking shelter with an African-American family would be a film about race. And superficially, it is. We get an early scene where Noraleen is beaten up for daring to register to vote. And later on, Lily's friend Zach will be abducted and beaten up for daring to go to a movie with a white girl. In the background, we can spy an Atticus-Finch-like lawyer, and Alicia Keys character - a feminist, activist member of the NAACP - screams for more screen-time as a representative of the social movements coming to the boil in the mid-60s. Now, that would have been an important and interesting movie.

But the dirty secret of THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES is that it's just not interested in investigating the reality of the ethnic minority experience in the 1960s. In fact, it falls victim to the same prejudice we have seen through the history of mainstream cinema, where ethnic minority issues are fit only as a framing device or context for the real meat of the story - which is all about the white characters. What THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES is *really* about is a dysfunctional father-daughter relationship. Lily Owens and her father T.Ray (Paul Bettany) have a violent, guilt-ridden relationship. T. Ray hates Lily and abuses her because he resents the fact that her mother loved her but didn't love him. Lily has to come to terms with the reality of her parents marriage and to learn how to empathise with her father. That's the real emotional journey of this film. And it has nothing to do with race.

Still, if you're looking for a soupy, schmaltzy, weepy sort of melodrama setting in a fairy-tale world of hot-pink houses and forever-sunshine, then THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES is at least nicely-shot, well-intentioned and well-acted, particularly by Dakota Fanning in the lead role.

THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES played Toronto and London 2008. It was released in the US last week and opens in Portugal on November 27th and in Germanhy on April 23rd.

CHARLOTTE'S WEB tells some home truths

CHARLOTTE'S WEB is a perfectly passable children's film based on the famous book by E.B.White. It stars Dakota Fanning as a little girl who rescues the runty pig from her father's axe. The little pig, named Wilbur, then moves into her uncle's stable and befriends an articulate spider called Charlotte. Charlotte sets about writing words in her web describing the pig as special, so as to persuade the humans of a miracle and save Wilbur from a pre-Christmas trip to the smokehouse.

The movie is filmed in live action, with a host of ridiculously famous actors lending their voices to the various animals - Julia Roberts, Oprah Winfrey, Steve Buscemi, Robert Redford, John Cleese, to name but a few. The voice-overs are well-done and the whole movie has a suitably fairy-tale feel, as evidenced by the fact that the orchestral score is by Tim Burton-favourite, Danny Elfman. However, apart from Julia Roberts who voices Charlotte and Dominic Scott Kay who voices Wilbur, the actors all have thankless tasks - doing their best with limited screen-time. This is particularly a problem for Fanning who finds herself upstaged by an alarmingly cute talking pig.

The movie has its fare share of cloyingly saccharine moments. But let's be clear. CHARLOTTE'S WEB is a movie about how all life ends in death and how some animals are higher than others on the food chain. The tone is set early on, when the little girl saves the piglet from her father's axe and the editor cuts to some sizzling bacon frying in a pan. So parents with little kids should be warned that the movie contains some heavy material - indeed teaching little kids some reality is exactly the point of the film. Still, you need'nt fear that this is a liberal, vegetarian rant. Both the novel and film are remarkably conservative. The message is not that bacon comes from cute pigs so don't eat it, but that this is how life is, so deal with it.

CHARLOTTE'S WEB is already on release in Australia, the US, the Netherlands, Greece, Singapore, Japan, Denmark, Mexico, Venezuala, Germany, Brazil, Poland, Kuwait, Argentina, Estonia, Iceland, Norway, Armenia, the Philippines, Switzerland, Belgiu, France, Sweden and the UK. It opens in Hungary, Finland and Hong Kong next week. It pens in Italy and Latvia in March and in Turkey and Spain in April.

AKEELAH AND THE BEE - as dopey as it sounds, but not a total waste

This review is posted by guest reviewer, Tomiwa: I hate feel good movies. I always want art and storytelling, rather than Hollywood's string driven weepfests. There is no shortage of string instruments in this movie, it relies heavily on well mined formula and the last third of it is as cheese laden as the Quattro Formaggi at my local pizzeria. Nevertheless, it does have it's good points.

It's a far more thoughtful movie than something like this needs to be, dealing with race and class issues in generally more interesting ways than Hollywood usually manages. The one exception to this is a really weird Asian stereotyping in the form of Akeelah's major opponent who is made out as a little Asian robot whose father insists on perfection without humanity. It's kind of the succesful and hardworking Asian kid and parent stereotype pushed to the extreme and even some humanizing at the end of the movie does not excuse this weird intrusion into such a race conscious movie.

The little girl who plays Akeelah is really engaging and enjoyable and is also 100% less creepy than Dakota Fanning, so if you all go see this, maybe she can steal some of that little alien's roles. Angela Bassett plays a tough, black woman and Lawrence Fishburne plays Morpheus in a sweater vest (really difficult roles for them to pull off) but they are both absolutely excellent and as always, worth watching.

The movie does leave you with that "I believe I can fly" momentum and I wouldn't advise seeing it at the top of a tall building. Ultimately, that weird race thing and the excessive amounts of sap do draw the movie down, but if you're a geek who needs a fix or you need something family oriented to take your mom or kids to, you could do worse.

AKEELAH AND THE BEE was released in the US on April 28th 2006 and hits the UK on August 31st. No continental European or Australian release date to report, but I'll update the DVD release when I have it.

WAR OF THE WORLDS - the greatest B-movie ever made?

In the wake of the over-blown quagmire that was MUNICH, my friend Nik suggested that Spielberg "stick to dinosaurs". It was a good suggestion - after all, JURASSIC PARK is the last genuine blockbuster movie that Steven Spielberg directed, at least in terms of box office success. However, the purpose of this review is to stake a claim for WAR OF THE WORLDS as one of the greatest B-movies ever made. The opening of the movie is high-class, with some nicely-observed modern family dialogue between divorced parent, Tom Cruise, his moody adolescent son and his precocious daughter, played by Dakota Fanning. And then, without wasting too much time, the aliens start attacking the earth and the whole thing just goes popcorn-tastic. Roads are ripped up, burning trains hurtle through railway stations, airplanes fall out of the sky. It's just a giant disaster movie with all the best bits rolled into one. Of course, this is Spielberg so all the whistles and bangs and explosions work well, especially when they ape scenes from Jurassic Park. (Just compare that scene where the tripod tentacle is sniffing round the basement with the raptors stalking the kids in the kitchen.)

But the great thing is that this movie also has some great dialogue that allows the characters to show "real" emotions. Tom Cruise is not a simple action hero - he is often more freaked out than his kids are and while this is clearly not the kind of iconic performance that he gave in Magnolia, it is leagues above the kind of cock-sure twit he usually plays in action movies. Dakota Fanning does what she does well too - she looks cute, is scared and screams a lot. For some reason the costume designer decided to give her the kitsch on-acid wardrobe of a seventies muppet, but that only adds to the charm. There are even some nicely handled patches of humour. "They came from somewhere else. Like Europe? NO, ROBBIE, NOT LIKE EUROPE." And we get the added bonus of seeing the always slightly creepy Tim Robbins as a loon.

Of course, the film does have its flaws, but even these are rather endearing. As we all know, the movie is based on the famous novel by H.G.Wells, wherein a bunch of super-intelligent aliens attack the earth and start exterminating humans using tripods that were buried underground millenia ago. Back when H.G. was writing I bet that spindly-legged tripods seemed really scary, but now, well, they just don't cut it. I reckon Spielberg would have done better to either redesign or show the devestation caused by the tripods rather than the tripods themselves. In addition, while the ending is true to the novel, and made a new and interesting point about evolution back in the day, to me, a contemporary viewer, it seemed a little bit weak. But you know what, this is WAR OF THE WORLDS, and I think you just have to go with it. Ditto the moment where I thought the movie really jumped the shark - when Cruise starts singing a "lullaby" to his daughter. I mean, it's painfully cheesy, but even here there is a certain charm in Cruise being willing to do something quite that ridiculous outside of Oprah.

WAR OF THE WORLDS is available on DVD.